Rodney Meere

A friend has died. W.J. Rodney Meere was the brother of my business partner Richard. Rodney was first a client and soon a friend. We played golf together, we drank together and we talked, how we talked. One night on a golfing jolly to Norfolk our discussion got so heated that the anxious waiter came over to check that all was in order. We laughed. We just liked to argue. Rod was a contrarian. So am I. I found it charming. I hope he did likewise.

Rodney was a man of substance, material and intellectual. He could wear an expensive suit less tidily than any man I have known and he introduced me to places I might never have ventured without his generosity. Best of all he treated me (indeed everyone so far as I could tell) as an equal, which I wasn't.

I will remember him thus: we were playing golf at Bamburgh, indubitably one of the world's most stunning spots; it was competitive (it always was) and we had reached, I think, the 16th, perched on a cliff-top and with a cavernous void in front of the green - one left one's trolley at the edge of the void and crossed to the green; Rod and golf trolleys were ever incompatible; as Rod putted I looked back down the fairway and was just in time to see his trolley, parked too close to the edge, topple comically and slowly forward and deposit his clubs into the valley below; he thought my laughter impertinent until I explained that I was not laughing at his putting; out of deference to his greater age I scrambled down to collect the clubs; we played on and the match was halved. There is a nice symbolism to that outcome.

A friend has died, but bloody hell it was fun while it lasted.